Making wpa_supplicant work with dhclient on Fedora

[Pavel Roskin]

On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 11:45 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:

> The canonical source for network config information in Fedora is the
> ifcfg file.  If there's something that is needed in the supplicant
> config that's not able to be expressed in the ifcfg file, I'd consider
> that a bug.

OK, that means support for one "network" per interface (i.e. what
wpa_supplicant.conf calls network).  That's limiting, of course, but
better than nothing.

> The problem with allowing a SUPPLICANT_CONFIG=/path/to/file is that then
> something like NM has to parse that file as well.  It also completely
> breaks the one-ifcfg-file-per-connection paradigm that is currently in
> use, since you can specify multiple network blocks in the supplicant
> config, but that's not how ifcfg files work.

That's not what I mean.  I mean, we can have files:

/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf
/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan1.conf

and so on.  If there is a specific file, it's used for the interface.
Otherwise, the default file is used.

> I don't think it's too big of an issue to have ifup-wireless write out a
> pristine wpa_supplicant.conf based on the information you put in the
> ifcfg file.

I think wpa_cli should make it possible to pass all configuration
parameters directly from the script.

I don't like scripts writing to /etc, but it's better to have something
working than nothing at all.

> NM has supported most WPA configurations (when the driver supports >=
> WE-18 of course) since at least early 2006.  What bits aren't working
> for you?

Well, that explains the lack of loud screams :-)

The NetworkManager homepage use to say that WPA support is planned, but
I cannot find that page anymore.  I believe I tried NetworkManager on
Fedora 8, and it was only asking for the WEP key.

I'll try it again on a clean Fedora 9 install.
> 
-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin